When a customer purchases a product composed of a plurality of parts and prepares spares of expendable parts of the product, or the parts break down and hence should be repaired, the customer needs a part catalog in which part numbers are listed for the customer to order the parts.
In the case of products composed of a few parts, it is relatively easy to create a part catalog for each product. However, in the case of products, for example, robot products, which are composed of numerous parts, and are required to meet various requirements of customers, and to deal with constantly advancing performance of control parts or the like, in an extreme case, products designed differently with very small difference for each product, the parts vary from product to product. In such products, therefore, it is not easy to create the part catalogs of the parts. In the case of the robot product, part configuration in each robot manufactured based on the customers' requirements varies from customer to customer, and its design cycle is extremely short. Therefore, in order to meet the customers' requirements, it is necessary to frequently create part catalogs containing different contents in a short period, which requires enormous labor and cost.
For this reason, the part catalogs of the robot products are created for a representative product in special occasion, for example, in a time period when new products are placed on sale, and thereafter, after services such as revision associated with design change are hardly provided. That is, the catalogs are transiently created. More often than not, the contents of the catalogs become obsolete, and hence become unserviceable.
Conventionally, the part catalogs associated with the robot product are created by manually selecting parts of the product from total part list in which all the parts used to manufacture the robot product are listed. Regardless of change in the parts to be used according to design change, there arise problems that part numbers before change are listed by mistake, wrong part numbers are described because of posting error, or optional parts demanded by the customer are not listed.
Further, it is virtually difficult to create the part catalogs to have a one to one correspondence with the robot products designed differently for each robot as described above, in view of required labor and cost effectiveness.